Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 489: Don’t intervene.

Chris’s brows lifted. "You confronted him."

"Yes." Said the girl with a serene smile.

"How kind of you."

"I was being efficient."

Dax’s mouth moved faintly.

Chris noticed and looked at him at once. "No."

"I didn’t say anything."

"You agreed in your soul."

Nayra ignored both of them. "He said that unfortunately, yes, it stayed."

Dax looked down once at the sleeping toddler in his arms and then back at his daughter. "Unfortunately."

"Yes."

Chris folded his arms. "That sounds like him."

"It did," Nayra said. "He wasn’t dramatic about it. He was annoyed."

"That also sounds like him," Dax said.

Nayra nodded. "He knows the age gap is there. He knows Sebastian is older, already working, already established, and not part of the same phase of life. He’s not stupid about it. That’s part of why he hates it."

Chris leaned back slowly into the sofa.

Nero knew exactly what made the situation inconvenient, unequal, and badly timed.

And the feeling had remained anyway.

Nayra, watching both of them with the patience of someone forced to explain plain weather to people who had somehow missed the rain, added, "He doesn’t want to be bothered by nobles and states already pinning him to marriage. That’s the part that made him mean about Dean. He didn’t want them deciding anything for him before he’d even decided what he wanted to do with the feeling himself."

Dax was quiet for a long second.

Then he said, very flatly, "Good."

Chris turned toward him. "Good?"

"Yes."

"Our son is fifteen."

"Yes."

"He has a crush on a twenty-one-year-old military heir of the largest ducal house of Palatine."

"Yes."

"He manipulated a clinical compatibility narrative to create political space."

Dax adjusted Jax a little higher against his chest, his expression unreadable in that infuriating way it often became when he was thinking as a father and king at once. "And he didn’t let the court choose for him."

Chris looked away first, toward the dark window, toward the gardens where late spring had begun softening the world outside, while inside the private suite everything was becoming more complicated by the minute.

"He is too young," he said.

Nayra answered before Dax could. "Yes."

Chris looked back at her.

She shrugged one shoulder, suddenly more serious than before. "I didn’t say he should marry him tomorrow. I said that’s why he did what he did."

That was fair.

Deeply irritating.

Still fair.

Dax’s gaze remained on his daughter. "Did he say anything else?"

Nayra thought about it. "Only that he didn’t want everyone making it ugly before it was even real."

Chris went very still.

Because that, more than anything else, sounded like a boy trying to protect not just himself but the feeling itself from being dragged under court language, bloodline panic, family expectation, and every other heavy-handed thing adults liked to do the moment they smelled the future in a room.

He rubbed once at his temple. "That is... more sensible than I wanted."

"Most things are," Dax said.

Chris gave him a flat look. "That is not a sentence you get to use when discussing our adolescent son’s private emotional life."

"It remains true."

Nayra, sensing the turn in the room had moved from revelation to processing, folded her arms and leaned one shoulder against the wall. "So."

"So," Chris repeated.

"So now you know."

Dax looked at her. "We know what he feels."

"Yes."

"We do not yet know what Sebastian feels."

Nayra hesitated.

That was enough to make both men focus more sharply.

Chris’s voice went very calm. "Nayra."

She looked mildly offended. "I don’t know know. I’m not inside his head."

"That was not the question."

She exhaled through her nose. "I think Sebastian noticed something. Maybe not all of it. But enough to be careful."

Dax’s eyes narrowed slightly. "Careful how."

"He doesn’t encourage it," Nayra said. "But he also doesn’t cut Nero down when he could."

Chris sat with that.

Because that, too, sounded plausible.

And dangerous.

And, in its own way, decent.

A man in Sebastian’s position - older, socially sharper, structurally safer - had more power in the situation simply by standing where he stood. If he had noticed anything at all and chosen caution over indulgence, that counted for something.

Chris disliked that it counted for something.

Dax, however, looked almost thoughtful now rather than alarmed.

Nayra caught it immediately. "Do not start liking this."

Chris turned to him at once. "Exactly."

Dax looked between them both. "I did not say I liked it."

"You thought it with posture," Chris said.

"That sounds subjective."

Nayra nodded. "No, Papa’s right."

Chris looked at her with dark satisfaction. "See."

Dax exhaled once, the sound somewhere between amusement and surrender. "I like that Nero is not choosing softness because it is convenient. I do not like the age. I do not like the timing. I do not like that he had to build space by lying first."

Chris’s expression eased by a fraction. "Good. For a moment you sounded far too pleased."

"I am pleased with the boy," Dax said. "Not the situation."

That hit lower than Chris wanted.

Because that, too, was true.

Proud, perhaps, in the infuriating paternal way.

Sorry, certainly, in the quieter one.

He looked at Nayra again. "And you are absolutely sure Dean was never the real problem."

Nayra gave him a look of astonishing patience. "Dean was the visible problem. Sebastian was the actual one."

Dax almost smiled.

Chris saw it and said, "No."

"I still haven’t spoken."

"You have an entire face."

Nayra pushed off the wall. "Anyway, I’m done now. I delivered the information. I would like my agreements honored."

Chris looked at her. "You negotiated dessert, a future motorcycle, and immunity for a stuffed pepper."

"Yes."

"That remains one of the most concerning sentences of my life."

"Thank you."

"That wasn’t praise."

Nayra chose not to hear that and crossed to Dax’s chair, carefully extracting the toy from Jax’s limp grasp. The toddler frowned in his sleep, muttered something that sounded like an accusation against theft, and then resettled when Dax’s hand moved once down his back.

At the door, Nayra paused and looked over her shoulder.

"For what it’s worth," she said, "I think Nero knows it’s probably hopeless."

Dax’s voice was flatter than before. "Why?"

Nayra hesitated only briefly. "Because every time he talks about Sebastian in his own head, he acts like he’s already apologizing for it."

Chris looked down.

Dax looked at the dark window.

Jax slept on, untouched by any of it.

Nayra, perhaps realizing she had finally said one thing too sharp to leave standing comfortably, softened a little. "But that’s why he wanted the nobles out first. He wanted one thing in his life not to be decided by other people before he understood it."

Then she left.

The door closed.

Silence remained.

For a long moment neither father spoke.

Chris was the first to move. He sat back into the sofa, one arm folding across his middle, the other hand resting against his mouth in thought. Dax stayed where he was, Jax warm and sleeping in his arms, his expression gone very still.

At last Chris said, quietly, "He’s fifteen."

"Yes."

"He should be allowed to want something without already preparing to bury it."

"Yes."

Dax’s answers were too short, too controlled.

Chris looked at him. "You’re angry."

"Yes."

"At whom?"

Dax’s gaze did not shift from the window. "Everyone."

Chris closed his eyes briefly. "We still do nothing."

Dax looked at him then. "For now."

"For now," Chris agreed.

Jax stirred, pressed his face sleepily against Dax’s chest, and sighed as if the entire room were being dramatic on purpose.

Neither father disagreed.